Page 7 of The Catacomb King
To my knowledge, no one had ever approached the Primordial Mountain, let alone tried to scale it. You’d have to cross over top of the underworld to do that.
But clear white rivers gushed from the mountain’s peak. From this distance, those rivers looked like white ribbons, undulating into the scarlet sea. I had studied as much as I could about mountain rivers, and I thought this one was runoff from melting ice caps, although any ice was invisible behind the clouds.
If I was right, that meant the water was drinkable.
I licked my lips.
When we reached the border, we stood on the human side. Calix regarded the rivers and the mountain and the sea. The grass over the underworld drifted in the breeze like fur.
I thought Calix was watching the fresh water from the mountain dump wastefully into the ocean, which was what I was doing. But then he asked, frowning, “Is it bigger?”
“Is what bigger?”
“This grassy area. The territory above the underworld. I feel like the mountain used to be… closer. Did the underworld get bigger?”
Some uncertainty flickered in my mind. Surely not. Except…
I remembered my boots, on the wrong side of the border.
I had thought someone had moved my boots. But when I’d turned around, no one had been there. I had been alone.
What if the border itself had moved?
No. That was insane. I said to Calix, “How would you know? You never came here before.”
“Hmph.” Calix’s eyes kept roving over the sea. “That red color isn’t natural, you know. Natural oceans are blue.”
“See, that’s the kind of shit you never said before you went to college.”
“Well, it’s true. Gods, I hate it here. Why did you bring me here, Persephone?”
I swallowed. Now that it was really happening, now that I was telling him my idea, I found myself so anxious my stomach churned. My hands shook a little as I spread my notebook pages on the rocky ground. “Okay. Here’s the long and the short of it: Limer needs a reservoir.”
Calix’s eyes roved over my papers. I watched, my heart in my throat, as he squinted at my schematics. Surely I’d measured enough times. Surely I had this right. “Is this a drawing of a reservoir?” he asked. “It’s good. But it’s too small. The reservoir that serves Corcagia is two hundred times this size.”
“It doesn’t matter. The principles are the same, no matter the size. All we need, basically, is a storage system — we can even just call it a giant box — that we can situate righthere.” I pointed to my meticulous, hand-drawn map. “In ideal circumstances, we’d build the reservoir up high, on stilts or something, so we could collect rain and then force water through pipes with gravity. But there’s no rain right now. So instead, look, I drafted a plan to build a freestanding reservoir on the ground and then elevate it at a later point, if the drought ever ends.”When, notif, I told myself fiercely. “The reservoir will be located near the fields and the village. People can carry water in buckets to the crops or to their homes. Later, we’ll build pipes that open and close with valves. We’ll install outlets strategically to bring water straight to houses and to irrigate crops. It’ll fix everything.”
I waited.
Calix did not leap up and sweep me into a hug at my brilliance. Instead, he rocked back on his heels. “I get the idea, but the Body would never authorize the purchase of thematerials and labor it would take to build something like this all the way out here. I’m sorry, Persephone. Limer is just too small.”
“I don’t need the Body to authorize it. We can build it ourselves. Right now I just need the box, and one big pipe to get watertothe box.”
“But there is no water.”
I took a deep breath. This was the part Calix wasn’t going to like. My stomach clenched. It was now or never. “That’s what I need you for. You’re a diplomat. Or a diplomat-in-training, anyway.”
Calix blinked at me. He wasn’t getting it.
“Everyone likes you. You’re smart, you’re charming. And I assume you have, I don’t know, methods you’ve learned in school, for getting people to do what you want. Negotiation tactics.” Along with the methods he already had, like making my stomach flip-flop every time he smiled.
He smiled now, obviously pleased. “I mean, maybe a couple.”
“Great. That’s why I’m asking you to go to the underworld and negotiate with the godlings for access.” I pointed to the gushing water from the Primordial Mountain. “To that.”
The blood drained from Calix’s face.
Oh no. This already wasn’t going well. “Calix,” I said, anxiously.
